Final cover reveal for this series!
I didn’t really stick to my schedule for revealing these. But that’s what this post is all about!
There’s a lot of writing advice out there, and a lot of it centers around schedules: get up two hours early in the morning to write, write every day during your lunch break, set up a specific time after dinner to write, write every single day. If you do any – or several – of these, that’s great! But then there’s the rest of us.
Another cover reveal on quarantine day!
If you’re in isolation right now, you’ve probably got one of three possible mindsets:
1. Oh God no I have nothing to do.
2. Oh God yes I have time to do things.
3. Oh God no I need money.
I’m going to touch on number 3 first. I’m immensely blessed to have safety nets (yes, more than one), and I recognize that. But most people are going to be in trouble in the coming months. I want to share two helpful solutions. The first is United Way, which has a relief fund to help people who are struggling to make ends meet. You can reach them at 866-211-9966, or online.
I’ve talked about getting a good book cover. Now I’m going to talk about editing.
Here’s a fact you aren’t going to want to hear: you need an editor. A good cover will make readers give your book a second glance, but you need to keep those readers once they crack open your book. It doesn’t matter how good a writer you are, how proficient your grammar is, or how many times you’ve reread your work. You’re going to miss things. You’re going to not know about some tiny grammatical issue. You’re going to have a sentence that makes perfect sense to you, but won’t to your audience. These are things I suspected before I hired an editor, but the edits I received cemented that fact. The thing is, you don’t know what’s gone wrong in your book before you have an editor comment on it.
First thing you need to determine is what type of editing you need. My stories are already highly fleshed out, finished, and complete. I’m concerned about word usage and repetition, so I looked for someone who could do copy editing on my books. Here’s an edit-rich section from my first book for an example:
If you have concerns about your story itself more than the grammar, you might need a developmental editor. Once you figure out what you’re looking for in an editor, it’s time to find one!
I wanted one with experience in the horror genre, and you’ll want one experienced in your genre. I posted for recommendations in a horror writers group on Facebook, and contacted several with requests for an edit sample, usually a page or two that the editor goes over and returns to you with comments. These help you pick someone who clicks with you and really gets what you’re looking for. One editor I contacted that came highly recommended refused to do a sample. I didn’t go with them.
Now you have an editor! They’ll cost a lot of money! Be prepared! As I’ve said, you’ve chosen an expensive hobby-turned-career. You’ll have to throw money down before the dollars flow back in.
My finely edited series The Fallowing is going up for pre-order, and will be available starting March 12th. Check out the first in the set here!
Though this is another cover reveal, I’m going to talk about something different today. You don’t have to be a writer to struggle with depression, anxiety, nagging doubts, mental exhaustion, or other mental difficulties. But writers can certainly feel these issues seeping into their work. I have, in the past few weeks. I’ve had a bout of depression recently that my meds just aren’t cutting into. I didn’t even want to make any posts today.
So what do you do when this happens?
Me, I looked at my goals for the month.
Okay, I’ll admit it – I made a mistake on my covers. But I’m not so proud that I can’t admit it.
I thought it would be really cool to have the series listed as “The First, The Second,” and so on, rather than “Book One, Book Two,” and so on. It seemed to fit the series and it would make it stand out, right?
Wrong. Continue reading
My first ever cover reveal! I don’t have the link for the pre-order of the book yet, because Amazon needs to approve it first. Lesson learned, but not that big a deal; I’ll just make more posts everywhere when I do have the link.
Smeared Black Ink 